Where Was Romney On Inauguration Day? At A Beach House In La Jolla

Mitt Romney was, as is to be expected, nowhere near Washington, D.C., on inauguration day.

Instead, according to NBC San Diego, he’s hanging with his family at a California beach house in La Jolla. While President Obama was freezing his butt off on the steps of the Capitol, Romney was relaxing in 73 degree heat at a beach house which sits right on the shore of the Pacific Ocean.

Who can blame him? The former Massachusetts governor has kept a low profile since losing the election, and with good reason; if you believe Red State’s Ben Howe, a series of high-paid consultants misled the campaign into thinking they had a smooth path to victory.

The failure of multiple systems to work correctly – such as the highly-toted Orca volunteer coordination and voter targeting software – coincided with biased, inaccurate polling to produce a cumulative effect: “Mitt Romney was ill-prepared for the actual numbers on election day and his false sense of confidence directly translated into how the campaign operated in the closing weeks…. As David Mamet famously said, ‘if you’re in the con game and you don’t know who the mark is…you’re the mark.’ Mitt Romney had no idea what was coming.”

The end result must have been rather humiliating. As the Washington Postreported soon after the election, there were no "what ifs" for Romney, just an absolute confidence in victory. He only wrote a victory speech – which resulted in the much-commented-upon delay between the obvious electoral defeat and his official concession.

Now, Romney appears as if he would rather fade out of public life – at least for the foreseeable future – rather than work to rehabilitate his political image.

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life,” said Romney’s son Tagg. “He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.”

A Romney staffer told NBC that it was “doubtful” that Romney even watched the inauguration.